Pre-Pregnancy Weight Just Around the Corner (It's Trying to Run and Hide)

Sunday, May 14, 2006

The beginning of the middle of the end

I love breastfeeding. I love the cozy snuggles, Ngaire's happy little nursing noises, being able to fill my baby's tummy.

I HATE pumping.

For the last week plus, my nipples have been killing me. Nursing is bad enough, but pumping is horrifically painful. Also, my milk supply has been gradually dwindling; while, when I started back to work, I regularly pumped 8-12 ounces a day, I'm now down to 4-6, and I'm not uncomfortably engorged by pumping time anymore, either.

So tomorrow I'm going to leave the pump at home and just hold out till I see Ngaire at 3:00. I always give her a hello nurse, and I figure that as long as she's hungry, she should do her breast-pumping duties quite admirably.

I have some ulterior motives, as well. I'm off to a week-long conference in July, right before the Squid's first birthday. I'm debating whether to wean her completely by then. If I don't, I'll have to get a hand-pump and use it every day to keep some form of milk supply going. She's not nursing all that much anymore; aside from an extended feed first thing in the morning, she's really down to short sips throughout the day and right before bed. So I'm not sure the effort of maintaining breastfeeding is worth the trouble.

That said, it makes me sad to think of bringing the breastfeeding part of mothering Ngaire to an end in the next few months. Sweet little snuggly Boo.

That's pretty much the way it happened with my first. We were going to be away for a week around his 11-mo birthday, but my milk supply was definitely down before then. He was having to take a bottle after nursing in the morning, and one day Paul brought the bottle in when we had just started, and Jay wanted the bottle instead of Mama. I felt a little bit bad about that, but it was nice not having to fear clogged ducts. I wasn't pumping- now I am, thanks to longer work days. It sure is a pain!!! Thank goodness it's only 3 days a week.